With continuous development and popularity of terminals (for example, mobile phones), terminals have become a necessity in daily life. In daily life, people often use mobile phones to make calls, answer calls, receive and reply to short messages, and so on. In actual use, when a user needs to view a short message, a message application needs to be started to display a message list, and then a certain short message of the short list is clicked for viewing content of the short message. When using the above manner to view a message, interface switching needs to be performed for many times, thus the operation process is complicated and time consuming.